Novelist Paul Auster tackles US gun violence in his 'Bloodbath Nation'

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In a hard-hitting 100-page book that includes photographs from mass shootings, acclaimed US novelist Paul Auster shed the light on America's epidemic of gun violence.

"Bloodbath Nation" (Grove Press) is due to be published on Tuesday in the United States.

Auster's latest work is concise and melancholic, and it is complemented by shots by photographer Spencer Ostrander.

One of the reasons Auster is writing it is to reveal a family secret that was withheld from him until he was a young man.

"The truth comes down to this: on January 23, 1919," he writes in the book, "my grandmother shot and killed my grandfather.”

Auster says his father was only six years old then and his uncle, who witnessed the killing, was nine.

The grandmother was tried in Wisconsin but found not guilty due to temporary insanity. She and her five children eventually relocated to New Jersey, "where my father grew up in a broken home."

“The Gun had caused all this, and not only did the children have no father, they lived with the knowledge that their mother had killed him,” Auster wrote.

Auster, like gun control advocates and victims' organizations before him, highlights the horrible statistics linked with gun violence in America: more than 40,000 individuals are killed by shooting each year, half of whom are suicides. Moreover, people outnumber guns by 393 million to 338 million.

Ostrander's images of the sites of mass shootings, such as the one at the nightclub Pulse in Orlando, Florida in 2016, are included in the book. That shooting claimed the lives of more than 50 people.

"I chose to focus on the site of the shooting as a symbol. Whether it’s rebuilt, whether it’s razed, whether it’s left to decay, that’s a symbol of how Americans value this issue," Ostrander said in October in an interview for Publishers Weekly.

“The fissures in American society are steadily growing into great chasms of empty space,“ Auster writes in his book.

In a similar context, deadly gun violence in the US continued right from 2022 into 2023 as more than 130 people have been reportedly killed and over 300 have been injured by gunfire in the first days of the New Year as per the data of the non-profit organization Gun Violence Archive that tracks shooting incidents.

The data highlighted that 131 individuals, including two toddlers and 11 teenagers, have been killed inadvertently or intentionally in the United States since the beginning of the year, while 34 teenagers and three children were injured.

Meanwhile, the US continues to struggle with violent crimes and mass shootings due to its loose gun laws and supremacist grounds for such violence.

Read more: Gun violence in US leading cause of death among youth